ScienceSifter: facilitating activity awareness in collaborative research groups through focused information feeds

As the amount of scientific information available to researchers increases, the challenge of sifting through the information to find what is truly important to their work increases, as well. In this paper we describe ScienceSifter, a tool that addresses this challenge by enabling groups of researchers and channel editors to create and customize information feeds. Using ScienceSifter, users can combine several information feeds, then filter them by keywords to create a focused information feed. They can view the feed in a shared information space in the form of a list, a list with descriptions, or a hyberbolic tree visualization, and they can save items to a shared list. Thus ScienceSifter can reduce the amount of time researchers spend finding and sharing information. It can facilitate shared intellectual activity and activity awareness among the members of the group